• If you're looking for a big and decently fast SSD with no major flaws for under $200, you're in luck.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  TeamGroup's MP34 is currently on sale at Amazon for $199.  For the 4TB model.
  
  It's not a new drive - this range first appeared in 2019 - and it's not PCIe 5 or even PCIe 4.  It "only" delivers read speeds of 3.5GB per second.
  
  But it's also not QLC - it's TLC, so generally faster and with a longer lifespan - and it's not DRAMless - it has a proper DRAM cache on board.
  
  At launch the 1TB model cost $160 so prices have come down a lot in the past four years.
  
  The Crucial P3 also offers 4TB for $199 right now, but that is QLC and DRAMless, so the only thing it has going for it is the reputation of the manufacturer: Crucial is the consumer brand of Micron, one of the biggest makers of flash and DRAM chips in the world.
  
  As a secondary drive either one should be fine, but the MP34 should also deliver the goods as a primary drive if you don't need bleeding edge performance.
  
  A year ago 4TB drives like these would have set you back at least $400 even on sale.  These are now cheaper than SATA SSDs, and five or six times faster.

• Meanwhile in Flashland Kioxia (formerly Toshiba's flash memory division) and Western Digital have announced 218 layer 3.2GHz 1Tb TLC flash chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  That means that a cheaper 4 channel controller on a PCIe 5 SSD will be able to hit 12.8GBps - or for PCIe 3 you'd only need one channel to basically max up the bus.
  
  This is particularly good for smaller drives.  Apple customers buying recent 256GB laptops have noticed that the performance has been cut in half over the previous year's model.  Of course Apple massively overcharges for storage and you can never, ever upgrade so you'd have to be an idiot to buy a 256GB Apple laptop anyway.
  
  They have other nasty habits that make it questionable buying any of their products at all.  More on that below. 
  
  
  
• Don't buy one of AMD's new budget A620 motherboards if you want to run an X or X3D CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It should at least run, but it will run at 65W economy mode, turning (for example) a 7900X into a 7900, and a 7900X3D into, um, a 7900X3D running at 65W because there isn't a specific model like that.  
  
  This doesn't actually lose you much performance though.  The 65W 7900 is only 6% slower than the 170W 7900X.
  
  Which makes you wonder why they bothered to go to 170W in the first place.
  
  
  
• AMD and JEDEC are working on DDR5-17600 memory for servers.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This uses a trick that basically puts two memory modules into one slot and interleaves the data from the two sets of chips, running at double the native rate.
  
  In the six years since Epyc CPUs first appeared they've jumped from four memory channels to eight to twelve, and there's just no room in servers for them to get much bigger. 
  
  So the solution is to make the memory faster, only that takes too long.
  
  So the solution to that solution is to basically RAID-0 the memory chips.
  
  
  
• SpaceX is preparing for a full test launch of Starship, likely this month.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Despite it being Ars the comments are mostly sane.  One comment praising Elon Musk got downvoted to oblivion, but so did one comment denigrating him.
  
  
  
• And it's going to the Moon.  Not this month, though.  In a couple of years.  (Space News)
  
  Carrying a privately developed lunar rover.
  
  
  
• The scammer who got Instagram "influencers" account's banned and then charged them to help get them reinstated may have been found.  (ProPublica)
  
  Of course this scam was only possible in the first place because Instagram is run by evil shitheads.
  
  Instagram declined to comment.  Evil, not stupid.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 03 2023 01:38 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, April 03 2023 10:40 AM (2tHvf)

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